Guest Author - Melissa Weise

The length of your story will, of course, depend on the story you are writing. But how to market your story will depend on its length. Stories are measured by word on the general market and an average page of written prose is 250 words long. In addition to averaging your word count by counting the number of pages you have written, you can also use the word counters that most word processing software offers.

If you write fiction under 100 words, it is considered micro fiction and is usually accepted online in Zines and for websites, for certain contests and in certain magazines. It also is more common for children’s fiction rather than adult fiction.

Fiction that is over 100 words but under 1000 words is called Flash Fiction and is usually accepted by magazines for one page stories, often romance. There are also a few contests that look at flash fiction exclusively.
Anything longer than 100 words but under 10,000 is considered a short story. Short stories are often accepted in contests, and less commonly in magazines.
Usually short story writers will get their short stories published as a collection or in an anthology with other short stories.

From 10, 000 to 20,000 words is the most difficult to market. It is called a novelette, and like short stories is most often published as part of a collection.

From 20,000 to 60,000 words is considered a novella and is usually the length used in an ebook rather than a printed book because of the ink and paper required for such a short story.

Fiction longer than 60,000 is considered a novel although anything more than 120,000 words would be considered particularly long for someone who is not established in the writing profession. The average novel is 300 pages long, or 75,000 words. Exceptions to this rule can be genre fiction as science fiction and fantasy often are very lengthy.

These are just some average lengths to go by. In the end, the quality of your story and not the quantity of words will be the real seller.